Posts from the “Books” Category

The Best Photo Stories of 2020, Documenting Youth Culture

Posted on December 16, 2020

Text: Orla Brennan— The halcyon years of youth have long captivated image- and film-makers. Shaping the cultural landscapes of their respective eras, the euphoric freedoms and inherent pains, counter-cultural ideals and rebellious fashions of communities of young people have continually offered us bold new ways of seeing the world.

During this dystopian year – when we retreated indoors, and nightlife venues, galleries and shops all shuttered – youth culture photography has offered a visual escape from our isolated lives, allowing us to dream of coming together and letting loose once again. Here, our round up of the most inspiring youth-focused photography published on AnOther in 2020 – from the dancefloors of 1980s Ibiza to the secret parties of 1990s rural Lithuania.

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*Tyler Mitchell. Still from Idyllic Space, 2019.*

Categories: AnOther, Art, Books, Fashion, Photography

Samuel Fosso: Autoportrait

Posted on December 15, 2020

In the mid-1970s, at the same time Cindy Sherman started making self portraits to explore the construction of white female identity, half way around the globe, Nigerian photographer Samuel Fosso opened his own studio at the tender age of 13. Casting himself as the subject of his work, Fosso used photography to stake his claim in the world.

Born in 1962, Fosso was sick and partly paralyzed as a child. Although Nigerians traditionally commission a portrait of their child at three months, his father saw it as a waste of money. Fosso wasn’t photographed until he was 10 — a void that shaped his vision from the very beginning. Growing up in Biafra during the Nigerian Civil War, Fosso fled to Bangui, Central African Republic, to live with an uncle after his mother died. He apprenticed at a local photo studio for just five months before opening Studio Photo National in 1975.

“In Africa we say to become a real photographer you have to take the picture and then make the print yourself; that’s how you establish your professional credentials,” Fosso says in the new book, Autoportrait (The Walther Collection/Steidl), which brings together five decades of Fosso’s self portraiture.

Read the Full Story at Blind

Categories: 1980s, 1990s, Africa, Art, Blind, Books, Photography

The Best Photos of 2020: Portrayals of Womanhood by Female Photographers

Posted on December 13, 2020

*Dry Campos, Cerquilho, São Paulo, 2019 © Luisa Dörr*

Notions of the “female gaze” and the “woman artist” are often in flux, a reflection of ever-shifting cultural mores of the times in which we live. The enduring need to claim and assert one’s identity after it has been marginalised, oppressed, and erased reveals the space where the personal and the political have become one.

In 2020, we find ourselves in highly factionalised times, divisions so deep and tensions so high, a hair trigger could set things off at any time. Into this morass, artists offer a balm, a space for meditation and mediation on transcendental truths about the sanctity of life and the fragility of it all. Their work reveals a profound desire to uplift, protect, and honour womanhood in all its forms. Here we reflect on the work of ten women artists who explore ideas of gender within the complex terrain of the female mind, body, and soul in the infinite splendor of limitless charms.

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*© Yurie Nagashima, Courtesy of Dashwood Books*

Categories: AnOther, Art, Books, Exhibitions, Photography, Women

Alys Tomlinson: Lost Summer

Posted on December 11, 2020

A century ago, Gertrude Stein coined the term “lost generation”, referring to the innocence stolen by the shadow of World War I. It was this same generation which roared into the 1920s, chasing the flower of youth that had been mowed down before it had a chance to bloom.

As 2020 comes to a close, so many have experienced profound loss on every level of their lives. For Gen Z, who are just now coming of age, the pandemic has robbed them of the opportunity to debut their talents on the world stage. Schools have closed, jobs disappeared, and social outings are fraught with danger at every turn.

British photographer Alys Tomlinson recognizes the toll the pandemic has been taking on the youth. “Exams cancelled, no chance to say goodbye to friends, end of year proms shelved and nothing to mark this significant stage of growing up and moving into adulthood,” she reflects.

As her commissioned work dried up amid the pandemic, Tomlinson decided to make black and white portraits of teens in her diverse North London neighborhood. From June through August 2020, she photographed some 44 teens using a 5×4 camera for a series of portraits collected in Lost Summer – a new book and exhibition.

Read the Full Story at Huck

Categories: Books, Huck, Photography

Margaret Durow

Posted on November 29, 2020

Without thinking we find ways to distance ourselves from the discomforts and indignities of life, denying the horrors that befall strangers, downplaying those may touch our lives, for trauma is one of the most difficult tragedies to manage and heal when it befalls our lives.

Though it surrounds us in countless forms, we seek ways to buffer its relentless effect, trying to mediate the toll it takes on our physical, psychological, and spiritual state. Whether we keep ourselves disconnected and numb or become volatile and reactionary, the wound often goes untreated, festering and growing worse while the pain seeps deeper into our being with the passage of every day, month, and year.

It is only when we have the courage to expose our most vulnerable selves that we may begin to transform the harrowing nightmares we have lived into something greater than ourselves for understanding requires mutuality. We must lay ourselves open to other people’s pain if we ever hope to heal our own.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Categories: Art, Books, Feature Shoot, Photography

Alan Lodge: Stonehenge

Posted on November 26, 2020

The Free Festival Movement of the 1970s took the UK by storm, offering a mélange of music, arts, and cultural activities at no cost. Beginning with Woodstock in 1969, the possibility of creating a mini utopia became a dream come true – that was until they became too popular, and the state got involved.

“’Free Festivals’ developed from people being fed up with the exploitation, rules, squalor and overall rip-off that so many events had become. They discovered something… a powerful vision,” says British photographer Alan Lodge, author of the new book Stonehenge (Café Royal Books).

“People lived together: a community sharing possessions, listening to great music, making do, living with the environment, consuming their needs and little else,” Lodge says. “Life on the road in an old £300 1960s bus, truck or trailer seemed like a bloody good option, weighed against the prospect of life on the dole in some grotty city under the Tory Government.”

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Categories: 1970s, 1980s, Art, Books, Huck, Photography

Dian Hanson: Sexy Books

Posted on November 26, 2020

Art books publishing has long been a rarified field, a niche within a niche with a rich tapestry of extraordinary houses known by a select few. Over the past century, only a few of these houses have succeeded at becoming brands – though one stands out: Taschen, which celebrates its 40th anniversary this year.

Founded in 1980 by Benedikt Taschen, the company started out as a comic book publisher before expanding into fashion, art, photography, film, design, advertising, architecture and, most famously, erotica. In 1999, Taschen made headlines when it released Helmut Newton’s SUMO, a lavishly oversized volume of the master’s work so vast that it came with its own stand designed by Phillippe Starck. Priced at $1500, the critics gasped – but industry insiders knew Taschen was on the cutting edge when they pre-sold 70 per cent of the 10,000 copy print run.

With its exquisite mix of high production values and clean design, Taschen books are for everyone, with prices starting at £10. But it’s what’s beneath the covers that counts. Sexy Book Editor Dian Hanson, who has been on staff since 2001, quotes Benedikt Taschen’s ethos with pride: “There is no forbidden art. There is good art and bad art and we will not publish bad art no matter what the subject, and we will publish all good art no matter what the subject.”

It’s a sentiment that has guided Hanson beginning with her very first Taschen book, Naked as a Jaybird, a collection of photographs taken from Jaybird, a 1960-70s porn magazine that capitalised the decriminalisation of nudist photography in the United States. The magazine’s timeline mirrors Hanson’s own singular path, one that is worthy of a Hollywood biopic in its own right.

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Categories: AnOther, Art, Books, Photography

Frances F. Denny: Major Arcana – Portraits of Witches in America

Posted on November 25, 2020

*Frances F. Denny, “Sallie Ann (New Orleans, LA),” Courtesy of ClampArt, New York City*

When the Puritans landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620 the English Protestants separatists cast a dark shadow on the pristine land, their arrival foreboding horrors to come. By 1692, their extremist ideology reached a fevered pitch as mass hysteria gripped the town of Salem, MA and beyond. Charges of witchcraft spread like wildfire, with more than 200 men and women accused of conspiring with the devil. With no separation between church and state, the colonizers used the courts to incarcerate, try, and execute the innocent for crimes they did not commit. In total, 30 were found guilty, 19 were hung, and at least five died in jail during the ordeal. It was far from the last time the government would be on the wrong side of history.

In 2012, American photographer Frances F. Denny made a startling discovery: not only was she the direct descendant of Chief Justice Samuel Sewall, who presided over the infamous Salem Witch Trials — but Denny also had another relative, Mary Bliss Parsons, who had been accused and found not guilty of witchcraft in 1674.

“Thank goodness I wasn’t born 400 years ago because I absolutely would have been burned at the stake,” says Denny, who has just published Major Arcana: Portraits of Witches in America (Andrews McMeel), a captivating collection of portraits and first person accounts of witches living and practicing across the nation today. “The discovery of being a descendant of both oppressor and oppressed is a hard thing to reconcile, but it feels very appropriate because I come from a long line of privileged white people. That coincidence felt like an honest way to dig into something uncomfortable.”

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*Frances F. Denny, “Meredith (Moretown, VT),” Courtesy of ClampArt, New York City*

Categories: Art, Blind, Books, Photography, Women

Ming Smith: An Aperture Monograph

Posted on November 24, 2020

Throughout her extraordinary life, Ming Smith has blazed a trail, becoming a pioneering figure in front of and behind the camera. Hailing from Columbus, Ohio, Smith grew up amid the horrors of Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan. Her high school guidance counselor discouraged her to attend college, advising Smith her future lay as a domestic, scrubbing floors. Undeterred, Smith enrolled in Howard University and received a BS in microbiology before moving to New York City in 1973.

To pay the rent, Smith took up modeling and worked alongside Grace Jones, B. Smith, and Toukie Smith as part of the first generation of Black models in beauty and fashion. But the limelight held no particular charm for Smith. Possessed with acute sensitivity to joy and pain, she found solace in being alone, camera in hand, guided by a desire to bearing witness to the spirit made flesh. Whether on the streets of Harlem or Dakar, making portraits of photographer Gordon Parks, writer James Baldwin, and musician Sun Ra, or photographing a field of sunflowers in West Germany, Smith used the camera to preserve the fleeting and fragile beauty of the world.

“When I’m shooting, I usually have a sense: ‘This is the photograph that I’m going to print. This is the moment,’” Smith says in the new book, Ming Smith: An Aperture Monograph. “I like catching the moment, catching the light, and the way it plays out…The image could be lost in a split second. I go with my intuition.”

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*Ming Smith, Amen Corner Sisters, Harlem, New York, 1976, from Ming Smith: An Aperture Monograph (Aperture/Documentary Arts, 2020) © Ming Smith, courtesy the artist and Aperture*

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Blind, Books, Photography, Women

Tom Wood: 101 Pictures

Posted on November 24, 2020

*Tom Wood. ‘Anyone got any hairspray’ 1983.*

Hailing from County Mayo, Ireland, Tom Wood fell in love with photography as a young man when he began visiting a local charity shop filled with glossy picture magazines, abandoned family albums, and vintage postcards from the turn of the century, which he purchased for a penny apiece.

He never thought of making photographs until he was an art student at Leicester Polytechnic in the mid-1970s. “After I shot a few rolls at school, I saw the same camera in a chemist shop, a Rolleicord, and bought that,” Wood says.

“I suddenly felt I could take pictures and it was dead easy. When I left college, all I wanted to do was make underground avant-garde films but 16-millimetre film was really expensive, so I thought I would just do photography for a little while.”

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*Tom Wood. Fashion sisters (sunglasses and platforms), 1973.*

Categories: 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Huck, Photography

Joseph Szabo: Hometown

Posted on November 19, 2020

*Hometown © Joseph Szabo, Courtesy of Damiani*

Following World War II, suburban hamlets began to spring up across the United States; like fields of dandelions they spread like weeds as the emerging middle class bought into the “American Dream” — a private home on a plot of land where they could raise a nuclear family with all the comforts of mid-century modernism. As real estate developments rolled out across previously pristine lands, acres of cookie-cutter homes dotted the landscape making it difficult to distinguish one region of the country from another.

But for American photographer Joseph Szabo, individuality found a way to make itself known, bursting through the beige like a splash of color. In his latest book, Hometown (Damiani, October 13), Szabo offers a topography of suburbia with a distinctive twist, as a sense of personal style emerges within a serene landscape replete with manicured lawns and muscle cars, sagging porches and lawn furniture.

Born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1944, Szabo is just a touch older than the Baby Boomers whose lifestyle has come to define the image of mainstream American culture over the past seven decades. After receiving his MFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, Szabo taught photography at Malverne High School in Long Island from 1972-1999 and began documenting his students’ lives, creating a mesmerizing portrait of teen romance, angst, adventure, and rebellion in critically acclaimed monographs including Teenage, Jones Beach,Lifeguard, Almost Grown, and Rolling Stone Fans.

“You try to capture life in the moment that speaks to you. They are fleeting—one moment it’s there and then its gone,” Szabo revealed in The Joseph Szabo Project, a 2011 documentary film that explores 1970s suburban life through his eyes.

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Categories: Art, Blind, Books, Photography